Monthly Update - September 2026
Green Day has a great song in “Wake Me Up, When September Ends”, and here we are, at the end of September and the summer.
One of the great things about summer is all the street festivals, and we had a great time participating in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive Car Free Day and the Urban Repurpose Fair.
Our Back to School Sale went really well and helped more schools and nonprofits be prepared for welcoming students back to class. There was a surge in applications for our Tech for Home program as well, supporting 40 individuals in accessing a refurbished device.
We were also glad to provide 50 free laptops to help families who had to evacuate their homes due to the Bald Ridge Forest Fire. Many of the families sent a note of thanks expressing their gratitude for the laptop, as filling out insurance claims on a phone was a challenge. This really demonstrates the importance of having the right device for a particular task and refutes the data Statistics Canada came up with stating 85% of Canadians have access to a device. It can be true that a mobile phone is a device, and it is accessible, but is it the right one? For most students, it's not enough to have just a phone, or one shared computer amongst a family.
““We lost our home and all our belongings in the Bald Ridge Forest Fire in Summerland. My computer was lost and we only had our phones to deal with insurance, RDOS, and many others. We thank you for the blessing and the care you provide to people in need like us.””
This is why our partnership with Surrey Fire Fighters Charitable Society is so valuable. In September, we helped deliver another 100 laptops, this time for Princess Margaret Secondary students, and have brought our total distributed to 1540 laptops. These students will now have an easier time storing their research and writing essays than if they had to solely rely on their phone. Thank you, Fire Fighters, for your support for Surrey students!
Thanks are also extended to our technology donors, including Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island University, and Teekay Shipping. Without donations, we can not provide equipment back into the community - from Surrey to Summerland and all across BC.
The end of summer also means that high school students have returned to school, and we won’t see any more student volunteers until Spring Break. Twenty-eight students volunteered with us over the summer, contributing 1167 hours and getting a great head start into future I.T. work-related roles.
We welcomed three interns via a partnership with Kwantlen Polytechnic University and MITACS. Two computer science students and a marketing student have been onboarded, and we are excited to work with them over the next few months.
Over the summer, we were nominated for two awards: Open Door Group’s 2026 Untapped Workplace Inclusion Award, and Surrey White Rock Board of Trade’s Environment and Business Award in the Small Business category. We were unsuccessful with the Workplace Inclusion Award and have our green fingers crossed for October 2nd, when the SWRBoT awards are announced.
All these activities help to make a big impact - thanks for reading about them, and be sure to share with your colleagues.
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